If you’d like to have Peter Sinclair get some much needed funds to make his videos even more effective, you can vote for him on the Brighter Planet website: http://brighterplanet.com/project_fund_projects/138 . His project is currently in second place and you can give him up to three votes (after having registered at the website).

Peter Sinclair has made dozens of videos about climate change over the past 18 months. My understanding is that he has created them all on his own time and at his own expense. As Mr. Sinclair once quipped, “I’ve tried to get help from George Soros and the New World Order, but they won’t return my calls.”

But now he has applied for a small grant to improve his work. Here is where you can help. If you like the work that Mr. Sinclair does, then please sign up and cast your three votes for his proposal.

since there are also natural overloads in the electrical grid at least in the northern locations due aurora borealis, what prevents wind turbines from acting as a flywheel to ease up the strain in the grid? i admit this mode of operating would have a very limited use due the demand of electricty, but is this (or could it be) part of the smart grid (I’m not familiar with the tech involved)?

I’m all for wind power, and I voted for Climate Crock over at Brighterplanet and all, but just a word of caution against the danger of mindless wind mega-development under the banner of “Climate Change Threatens Everything, So Anything Goes As Long as It Fights Climate Change!” It has become a little too easy for some climate-change-fighters (bless them!–seriously) to deride any local resistance to any renewable-energy project whatever, anywhere, for any stated reason, as “NIMBYism”.

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“it’s clear that many people, in all parts of the country, have been dramatically impacted by the noise of wind farms near their homes, most commonly by sleep disruption when turbines operate in low winds aloft while the surface is calm and very quiet. While of course there are some contributing attitudinal factors, these are only part of the picture, and cannot be justifiably used to explain away the issue. Many of those now affected were wind farm supporters, and indeed would be happy to continue seeing turbines, if they were far enough away to be more consistently inaudible. To dismiss all these people as cranks, or as hyper-sensitive social outliers, does a disservice to constructive public discourse and short-circuits our opportunities to learn from their experiences as we continue to develop new wind farms.”
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To insist on intelligent decisions about wind turbine siting is not necessarily a crypto-denialist attempt to undermine wind energy. The fact is, all energy sources do harm. Some do less harm than others. Wind, intelligently sited, can do relatively little harm. But it is not magic — it is big business, big technology, big money, and must not be exempted from scrutiny.

The video’s take on “firming” or intermittency compensation for all power sources is right on the money, but I think its take on pumped-hydro storage is too facile. US sites for hydro storage do not co-locate with the vast Plains wind resource or, elsewhere, can only be developed at a rather high (local) environmental cost. Hence the US Energy Information Administration predicts zero growth for pumped-hydro in the US through at least 2030 (http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/stimulus/excel/aeostimtab_9.xls). Storage is good for grids in general and renewables in particular but not so simple, in the US, as just bulldozing in a bunch of storage lakes.

Larry has made sensible and essential points, many of which I would have expanded upon if not confined to a 10 minute video broadside.

Most objections to wind power are not nearly as well informed as Larry’s, for instance, George Will’s assertion recently that wind turbines would kill far more birds than the gulf oil spill.
It’s this kind of nonsense that I aim at, admittedly using a cudgel sometimes where a scalpel would be more appropriate.
My bad.

The Bat thing is real, and there are several approaches to mitigating these impacts. One is, the recognition that bats tend not to fly in high wind conditions, and selectively shutting turbines down when low winds meet criteria as “high bat” conditions. Experiments with such techniques have allowed impressive reductions in bat mortality with minimal impact on power production.http://www.batsandwind.org/pdf/Curtailment_2008_Final_Report.pdf

Offshore turbines have no bat problem, and evidence suggests that, at least at offshore sites investigated by Danish researchers, bird impacts have been minimal to nil. None of this is to suggest that any kind of mortality should be ignored, or that good siting criteria should not be applied.

My observations of noise at various wind sites, anecdotally suggest that the problem is generally overstated by opponents, but may at some sites be an issue.
Certainly research is necessary in this area, but technical fixes for noise dampening don’t seem far fetched.
Bottom line:
According to a study at Lawrence Berkely lab, there is no impact on property values from wind turbine siting.http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/study-no-impact-on-property-values-from-wind-turbines/

Finally, it is understood that pumped storage is not the ultimate solution to energy storage and wider use of renewables.
The fact is, load management and a better grid will be the main tools, as experience has already shown, and Stanford’s Mark Jacobsen has done the work to show that a wide array of interconnected wind farms produce base load power with out backup.http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf

But “What do you do when the wind stops” is still a laugh line and showstopper on the teabag circuit, and John Q can’t always get the finer points of grid architecture in a 10 second sound bite. So I’m showing that energy storage is not science fiction, its off the shelf, and we have a number of approaches to do it, if we need to, that are already working, and have worked for decades.
In my state, its more than a rhetorical device. It really is significant that we have the Ludington Pumped storage plant on Lake Michigan, which can pump out 1800 MW when needed (for comparison, the Hoover Dam is 2080 MW)

It means we can press ahead with wind development, using storage as necessary, without waiting for the smart grid that is coming.